Granted, most people do not see Knol as a direct threat to Wikipedia, and the title of the post might upset some people… Even Google noted that Knol is not designed to compete with Wikipedia, but you have to admit that from a online knowledge-base perspective, the sites are quite similar. Knol might become the preferred choice in this field within a very short time.
1. Moderated data
The big difference between the two is that Knol is less anonymous then Wikipedia, it allows the author to moderate their respective articles. The idea is that the Author remains involved, since their name and reputation is permanently attached to it. This approach takes people out of anonymity and potential incorrect contributions, and might lead to higher quality articles prone to error. Knol allows the community to rank respective Knols, and allows more Knols about the same topic, another big difference between the two services.
2. Ads enabled
Knol will have ads enabled from launch, supplied by Google AdSense. Simply enable your adsense in your profile page, and you are ready to make some money from your content. If you have been contributing to Wikipedia (or not), simply copy your data to Knol and get Adsense dollars from it. (read more)
4th Reason: Search Engine Results Position
The Google Knol I created just yesterday entitled ‘How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes’ is already appearing on Page 1 of a Google Search for “read russian” with 12,300,000 results following.
See http://www.google.com/search?&q=read+russian
I see it as number five David. Also I bet with you that links to Knol will be the separate part of the search result at Google. Like Google Books are.
Yes, I get position 5 with that search too – #5 out of 12 million is pretty cool.
I think you may be correct about different listing Ivan, and it’ll become part of a more semantic search experience.
However, Google may have to be ‘neutral’ about this content and not favour it over anything else – after all their reputation is built on quality, unbiased search first and foremost.
3 reasons why it won’t:
1) Wikipedia has a big head start with 2.5 million articles in English. Even with PageRank, Google can’t push its own content too blatantly, without ruining its aura of neutrality.
2) Seth Godin’s Squidoo has been around for years, and it hasn’t taken off. Knol is very close to the same thing.
3) As anyone who blogs or tries to build a site with AdWords as a model, those $30 monthly checks are NOT the reason you keep doing it.
Google has promised many times that it will not get into the content business, and it should learn that it should keep its word – this is a strategic mistake for them because of the direct conflicts of interest that result from their participation in this space.
Also, good reply from ‘Azharcs’:
3 reasons why Wikipedia will kick Knol’s Ass.
[0] => No ads and it is clean. It is made by people who don’t intend to make money, created by people whose world don’t revolve around money and read by people who value knowledge more than money.
[1] => Wikipedia is millions of pages ahead of Google Knol when it comes to content. 7 million pages in 200 languages. Money can’t buy you that.
[2] => Wikipedia is synonymous with knowledge but with Google Knol, only the first four letters match, that is the closest it comes to knowledge.
I can go on, but will stop here. This is Google’s narrow minded way of making money by showing more ads. They clearly were directing lot of traffic to Wikipedia pages, they realized why direct the traffic to some other site when we can let users steal content from Wikipedia and show it in Knol.
No matter how hard they try, Wikipedia will never contain even 1% of the world’s knowledge.
At first glance Knol feels more human to me, more part of the Internet. I probably won’t use it though, I have enough work to do on my own domains, and comments to post ;-)
The honors surgery medical students at Tulane were just sitting around waiting for a lecture and it came up that wikipedia has become scary accurate for a lot of biomedical stuff. Like, it becomes difficult in one’s own mind to justify the primary literature research when Wikipedia is patently accurate on most of this subject matter. I’ve even had new, referenced articles on microbiology pulled because, for example, an admin, who happened to be a PhD microbiologist, felt the subject should be a redirect to a larger article. He was probably right.
The mental model that Wikipedia is maintained by 20-year losers in their parents basements listening to emo is probably not as accurate as you might like to think. Those are just the ones who have time to take pictures of themselves.
“If you have been contributing to Wikipedia (or not), simply copy your data to Knol and get Adsense dollars from it.”
sounds like a responsible approach to collaboration
You can’t copy content from Wikipeda to Knol because the licenses aren’t compatible.
Knol’s US montly visitors are around 115,000 at the moment accordig to quantcast.
What does it say about knol’s progress?
Да,согласен с предыдущими блоггерами
^..^ :-)
Хм,согласен с предыдущими высказываниями
^..^ Bye